Re: Problems with IMAP connections to Gmail

Raza Rizvi wrote:

> For about a week now, connections from my Mulberry 4.0.8 running Windows
> XP machine have been throwing up "A problem occurred while decoding the
> information sent from the server" message while accessing an IMAP account
> within Gmail.
[...]
> Has anyone else seen any occurrences of this? Bad mail in the mailbox?

Yes, I have seen this.  I believe it is due to bad mail in the mailbox. 
Certainly when I used the gmail web interface to move the offending 
message(s) to another "folder"[*], then I was able to open the original 
mailbox in Mulberry again.  FWIW, I'm running Mulberry on OS X, so it's not 
a client platform-specific problem.

I don't know if the bad email is due to gmail doing something out of spec 
with attachments (both bad messages I've seen have attachments) or the very 
unlikely case that there is something that Mulberry can't handle. 
Personally, I'm more inclined to blame gmail because other aspects of its 
IMAP capabilities are woeful (e.g. I can't bulk assign multiple messages to 
a label(/folder) because it won't preserve the original order of UIDs 
resulting in messages appearing unordered in Mulberry, combine that with 
not supporting the SORT capability means that you can't work around that 
first issue on the client side).

Cheers,

    Bernie

[*] Gmail doesn't use folders, it applies labels to messages and then 
presents labels as folders to IMAP clients.